


he was a man once

by manrei



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Metafiction, Other, Short, but i like thinking about the outsider, i'm late to this fandom and this was probably done hundreds of times, lonely rat boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 04:48:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4421969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manrei/pseuds/manrei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the outsider muses about laughing, dealing with an angsty thing called emotions, and the inconvenience of death</p>
            </blockquote>





	he was a man once

He does not know what he is. What he was called when blood ran through his veins is just as forgotten as the cities he’s watched weathered to rubble, over and over. His followers and those who devote their lives to burning his totems refer to him as the Outsider, an apt title, how original. In the books older than they are, he is called a leviathan. A great and fearsome creature of the deep, lying in wait to drag screaming mouths into the dark. Who knew that it’d be in the shape of a man.

He knows that he was human once, but he does not remember much about the life he led. He was tall for his age, he thinks, and he used to laugh. A lot. He does not recall how it felt to perform the action, but rather the idea. The upturned cheeks, the crinkled eyes, the head being thrown back as the mouth croaks a joyful croak. It would be ridiculous for him to even attempt to do such an action in this time, an old and powerful entity as he, but that does not stop him. His lips part for a smile full of teeth the color of river krust pearls, his cheeks no longer the color of soft sand, but a bruise. 

His mouth is wide, his lower jaw going up and down, trying to do it from muscle memory. Being what he is, does he even have muscles? He wonders. _"Ha, ha."_  

It comes out monotone. Dead. Perhaps this explains why the jokes he makes usually go unnoticed. Is it because the people he has dealt with are normally so sober, so solemn? It's not him, is it? He's funny--was funny-- _is_ funny.  _Is._ He thinks. 

The truth is, the nameless god who floats on the plane of this impossible world sometimes misses what it's like to feel. By this, he does not mean feel as in experience emotion, because he does, but feel in the way that the living do. Because being both an entity of the Void and a former vessel of flesh, defining the feeling he does is complicated. He sees so much, hears so much,  _feels_ so much. The way in which humans process emotion is different than the one that is practiced with him. 

He watches the liquid red flow from the boy's eyes and down his cheeks, the blood of his days-dead assailants forming a flaky crust on his boots from where it had splattered, and the bite wound on his skin still angry and festering. This is not a rare occurrence in this period, an unknown child dying on the streets. The people of the city don't look twice. From the looks of his pale skin, he does not have that much time. The Outsider watches with a distant curiosity, similarly to how one watches an insect thrash its spindly legs in a puddle of water. As something with as much ability as he possesses, he knows very well that he can save this child from rotting from the inside. Pluck the bug from the water and watch it shake off the droplets, _live,_  but he doesn't. He likes the show. 

At another point in time, he feels the man's quiet rage and witnesses, with much interest, this man spare the guard. The Outsider doesn't understand this. His blade was sharp. There would not have been any pain in the death.  _Choosing mercy when you already have so much power is a rare thing_ , he thinks. He's intrigued. For a moment, he feels a pang where his heart used to be. It is faint, an echo of an echo as with most things he feels, and that is when he remembers. The rope digging into the flesh of his wrists; the chanting in the strange language that seemed to be coming from everywhere, all at once; and the low moans and chain clinks of a struggling whale, still alive, being sliced open by blades fastened to sticks. Human fingers digging into the warm, slippery meat to extract its bones. Rough hands slipped the rings onto his fingers with so much force, it broke the skin. He remembers feeling helpless, vulnerable, as they slathered his flesh with whale oil, the chanting growing louder and more ominous, and him screaming so much that his tongue tasted blood. He remembers the feeling of the salty, coppery liquid dripping onto him, the freshly carved runes and bone charms humming their dreadful siren song of power around him, the pain, and the darkness that engulfed him after a few moments had passed. They threw him into a pit of flaming oil and raised their cut hands to the sky.

He remembers the whole-body itch of the Void stitching itself to him--thousands of tiny needles sewing skin and  _other_ together. He recalls opening his eyes only to find himself naked and waist-deep in an expanse of saltwater only to watch as... _the sea,_ a rising wall of deep blue, beautiful and horrible, come hurtling towards him. And once it hit, his body was tossed under and around the depths like a rag doll until he opened his eyes again, only for them to come into contact with a pair with milky irises and black pupils larger than he was. The tentacles of the great whale, half covered in barnacle, wrapped around his suspended body and pulled it into its gaping mouth. In its throat, he saw the world and what would be: floating islands, hundreds of lives dying and living at the same time, lips stained with wine and lips covered in ash. He slid down the whale's bumpy tongue into the abyss and he felt...cold. Lonely. The sight gave him so much, but left himself with so little. He gained knowledge too dangerous for any ordinary man to possess, but he lost his smile. 

Which is why he watches. He cannot change the fate of those he shows himself, but he can intervene in a way so that they can take it into their own hands. The gift of being able to control the course of one's life is his favorite, which says more about the life he once lived than he lets on. It makes him feel a connection to these fragile, short-lived beings. They can choose what they'll do in their next minute, change their tomorrows. Sometimes he wishes he can do the same thing for himself. 

Though this activity does sometimes prove to be entertaining for him, it keeps him from thinking about what will inevitably happen to him. Death is such a quick thing for humans. They're candles blown out at the softest of breezes. There one second, no more the next. Predictable. He can only muse about what death would be like for something like him. Would he feel it? Would there be pain? Screaming is out of the question. He hates the idea of begging for his life (if this could even be considered living), because he had gone through all that before. Death will come for him one day, for sure, and when it does, perhaps he'll finally be free. In retrospect, that way of thinking is far too optimistic. There can be no happy ending for what he is and he can't say for sure what it will even be like. Excruciating, maybe. Horrible. He wonders, this man-shaped god with eyes that, if you look closely enough, glitter with the lights of creatures that glow in the dark: in the moments before the last leviathan falls, will he feel...afraid? 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm pretty new to this fandom and this was probably done hundreds of times, but i just couldn't resist. this was inspired by someone saying that they wanted to see the outsider try to deal with his weird human feelings and honestly, i'm not quite sure if i nailed it. baby steps, i guess. i hope you enjoyed it, though!
> 
> note: i always see drawings of him depicted with him having literal stars in his eyes and i thought it'd be interesting for there to be like (cosmic) bioluminescent photophores reminiscent of deep sea animals instead because he is, you know, a whale god. creature of the depths. kinda. you get what i'm saying, right?


End file.
